A.I.? Not I.
OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman appeared on The Tonight Show acting like an A.I chat bot.
The sizzle…
Jimmy Fallon is known for his laugh. As host of The Tonight Show for the last eleven years (ELEVEN YEARS? HOW DID THAT HAPPEN SO FAST?), Fallon is not known so much for his interviews, as he is known for his uproarious–some say forced–laugh during his interviews. Fallon has been given lots of flack for laughing too much and too loudly at things that are maybe not that funny… or aren’t funny at all. But I don’t give flack him for that. There are two schools of thought here. One is that his “fake” laughter is so fake that it distracts from the conversation. The other school of thought–the one I subscribe to–is that the whole idea of a “talk show” is a construct set up to sell products and not to have real conversations. None of the conversations would happen without the commerce, so if Fallon feels like he needs to grease the conversational skids in order to keep the merchandise moving, then so be it.
I’m sure that Jimmy Fallon is occasionally really laughing. It would be impossible for him always to be faking it, and I believe that I have actually caught a real Jimmy Fallon laugh on a recent episode of The Tonight Show. The laugh emerged in response to least likely mirth-maker. It wasn’t a comedian doing a well-honed routine that they passed off as a spontaneous bit of chit chat. It wasn’t an actor dripping with charisma. It wasn’t a musician telling tales of epic shows, making us so gleeful that the joy bubbles over into guffaws.
Nope.
It was Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI.
Yup.
I know what you are thinking. I had no idea that Sam Altman was funny. There’s a good reason that you didn’t have that idea. Sam Altman is not funny. At all. In fact, his whole persona comes off like a person who uses A.I. to appear more human. I would guess his A.I. search is something like…
“How do I act like a person?”
“What do I do to be liked by the others?”
“Am I happy?”
Let me be clear, these are all questions that we have probably asked ourselves at one moment or another. I know I have, but I would not recommend trying to find the answers on ChatGPT (OpenAI’s chat bot) or any of the other A.I. platforms. Yet, after watching Altman’s “conversation” with Fallon, I am 1000% sure Altman asked ChatGPT some version of the question, “How do I talk to Jimmy Fallon?”
The segment opens on Altman explaining what ChatGPT is to Fallon. It is quickly apparent that Altman didn’t prepare well for this question. After a bit of fumphering, Altman says a sentence that will haunt the dreams of mental health professionals, guidance counselors, and parents everywhere.
“It’s like a general purpose, sort of, life advisor.” - Sam Altman on The Tonight Show
“Oof.” - Me at home
Altman even claims that people have solved their own medical mysteries using ChatGPT. You know the #1 thing that doctors don’t want you to do? GOOGLE YOUR SYMPTOMS! Well, Altman not only wants you to use a computer to look into your symptoms, he wants you and the computer to come up with a treatment plan and insist your doctor act on it.
“Here you go, doc! Imma just need you to call these prescriptions into my pharmacy. Me and Dr. ChatGPT figured out what I needed. Also we have fallen in love. Can you be a witness to our marriage?”
Altman and Fallon’s conversation shifts to Altman’s new baby. (Every time I type his last name, I can’t help feeling like Sam’s surname is weirdly accurate.) Alt_Man then utters the statement that sent parents everywhere looking for a pillow to bury our faces in, so we could hide our shame.
“I cannot imagine having gone through, like, figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” - Sam Alt_Man
Alt_Man quickly realizes how batshit cray cray that sounds, so he tries to save himself.
“Clearly, people did it for a long time no problem.” - Sam Alt_man
That’s when it happened. Jimmy Fallon laughed. But it wasn’t his over-the-top, mouth agape, cackling, hand-slapping desk laugh. This was more of time travel back to Jimmy Fallon as a Catholic school boy when his priest made an accidental double entendre, and Jimmy had to stifle his laugh.
“Jimmy, come to the front of the church. JIMMY HURRY UP AND COOOOME!”
This was the kind of laugh that you do when you are caught off-guard by the thing someone just said, and you don’t want them to know that you are laughing at them. It is the kind of laugh that you sometimes try to turn into a cough to cover it up. It is the kind of laugh where you pretend that you just remembered something funny from a long time ago that has nothing to do with this conversation. When you are a comedian, it is the kind of laugh that triggers a bunch of other punchlines in your head but you have to save them for another time. I bet backstage after the taping that Jimmy was cracking up The Roots with all the things going through his head at the moment Alt_Man said that he couldn’t raise a kid without ChatGPT.
Even the audience’s reaction was muted. They laughed a bit at Alt_Man’s admission, but even they seemed to be a little unsure of how to take this information. If this admission had been uttered by Will Ferrell instead of Alt_Man, we all could have trusted that this a comedy routine and not a confession of the saddest style of parenting.
I’m a dad (3X), and there are moments when I don’t know exactly how to address my kids’ immediate needs. This was especially true when they were newborns. The thing I remember most is that not only do parents in your life have plenty (AKA too much) advice for you, but there are ton of books that the Parenthood Industrial Complex wants to sell you on how to raise the perfect baby or how to get your perfect baby to sleep through the night. At some point, I understood that I just had to FIGURE IT OUT! But forgetting all that, at least I could trust that the information that I was getting from a parent or even a book on parenting had been tried out or vetted in some way.
The steak…
A.I. is just scraping the Internet and/or whatever information is fed to it (in violation of so many copyrights) and passing that off as “new information”. I understand why we want to trust A.I. We grew up watching how much fun R2D2 and C3PO were. We saw how helpful it was on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Jetson’s Rosie was… fine being an unpaid worker. The TV show Knight Rider had car named K.I.T.T. that had a British accent! A.I. in movies and TV was always awesome… until it tried to kill you. But in real life, A.I. is more like a college student at 3am, high on Adderall, who has a book report due and who is simultaneously reading Huckleberry Finn, scanning the Cliffs Notes on Huckleberry Finn, and watching Hal Holbrook’s one man show on Mark Twain, while listening to the song Tom Sawyer by the band Rush.
A.I. is a word salad sold as a Michelin-star meal. And Sam Alt_Man was at The Tonight Show to sell us all this artificial “intelligence.” Alt_Man was there to move all his 2025 ChatGPT merch to make room for the 2026 ChatGPT merch. But he should have sent a better salesperson, because reading the YouTube comments I don’t think his suggestion to “let A.I. raise your baby” is landing.
I understand that the A.I. of today is not the A.I. of tomorrow. A.I. will get “smarter” and “smarter,” but at whose expense?
We are already seeing news stories about the significant damage that A.I. does to the environment, and A.I. just got here. A.I. uses unimaginable amounts of water, and it also creates a toxic environment near the places where the A.I. supercomputers help the Sam Alt_Mans of the world figure out how to raise their babies. The largest A.I. environment-ruining supercomputer is located next to a Black community outside Memphis, TN. You don’t have to ask A.I. why something so bad for the environment was built next to Black people. I can tell you why: racism. You also don’t have to ask A.I. who would want to own a racist supercomputer. I’ll tell you again: Elon Musk.
Elon used to be a part of OpenAI, but as usual, Musk had a tantrum and started his own A.I. platform. It’s called Grok. Also in the usual Elon Musk fashion, Grok is more like a computerized version of Elon’s limited intelligence than it is artificial intelligence. Yes, I’m saying that Grok, like Elon, is full of racism, antisemitism, and general, all-around hatred.
A.I. is not a force for good. A.I. is only good as the information that is entered into it. That means A.I. is only as good as the person in charge of that information. Because the tech bros who own the A.I. platforms are generally not good people, the A.I. is a reflection of them. Therefore A.I. has no problem ripping off people’s intellectual property all day, every day. A.I. is also not making us smarter. It is filling our head with things that the A.I. algorithm has scrapped from wherever it wants on the Internet. A.I. is making us intellectually less curious at a time when being an increasingly less intellectually curious country has taken us to one of the lowest points in our country’s brief history. A.I. is also robbing us of the only thing that makes humans worth damn as a species. It is taking away our creativity. And worse, A.I. is taking away our belief that other people are intellectually curious and creative. I am beginning to see videos where people are forced to defend their actual hard work as their own actual hard work and not A.I. We are at a place now where if something seems too good, many people believe that it must be A.I.
Meanwhile, we are being served heaping piles of lukewarm A.I. slop regularly and we don’t even realize it.
While Sam Alt_Man attempts to come off on Fallon’s show as a quiet and humble Dad_Man on The Tonight Show, Alt_Man may actually be Demon_Man. OpenAI has a platform named Sora that creates short A.I. videos based on prompts. As a part of a recent update to Sora, users are not allowed to put celebrities into their A.I. hellscapes. That sounds good until you realize that the platform was fine letting users put celebrities in their A.I. dystopias if the celebrity was dead. Yup. You read that correctly. Alt_Man’s platform allowed you to take dead celebrities’ images and turn them into stomach-churning A.I. slop.
Yes, that is just as ghoulish and sick as it sounds. I noticed it because for some reason my YouTube algorithm began serving up fake WWE clips of “Martin Luther King” or “Kobe Bryant” as wrestling heels. I would like to say I didn’t click on any of them, but initially I couldn’t resist the urge of WTF is this??? Completely unsurprisingly, the families and estates of many famous folks were not on board. Alt_Man has since changed course and announced that Sora would remove content featuring deceased celebrities BUT ONLY IF THEIR FAMILIES OR ESTATES REQUESTED IT. See, I told you that Alt_Man might be a Demon_Man.
Not wanting to be left out, it was just announced that Disney is paying OpenAI $1,000,000,000 (ONE BIIIIIIIILLION DOLLARS) to let ChatGPT and Sora users become their own Dr. Frankensteins and surgically attach their bad ideas to Disney’s intellectual property. Yes, Disney is paying OpenAI so that randos can ruin the hard work that Disney once hired real people to do.
But honestly, the best argument against A.I. is that Donald Trump loves A.I. Trump uses it to create videos of him dropping feces on his enemies. And Trump just signed an executive order making A.I. regulation solely the purview of the federal government. So much for Republicans loving states’ rights. No surprise that Sam Alt_Man has found his cozy spot in the same place that most of America’s billionaires seem to, Trump’s back pocket.
Of course, it’s not surprising that when new technologies emerge, two industries get to work quickly: the pornography industry and the racism industry. I’ll spare you examples from the first industry, but just imagine the horrors that are occurring. (Maybe don’t.) Here is a good example of how A.I. racism has real world effects.
The day that Charlie Kirk was killed, I did something that I don’t normally do. I Googled myself. I wanted to see if I had ever been in direct contact with Charlie Kirk. I wasn’t sure if we had met or had an interaction and I had just forgotten, so I looked up “charlie kirk w kamau bell.” I was shocked by what I found, and I don’t mean that in a clickbait-y way where I wasn’t really shocked. I was really shocked by what Google’s A.I. discovered.
OK, A.I., ummm… thanks for your thoughts, but there’s one, tiny problem. NONE OF THIS HAPPENED! I know it didn’t happen because Google’s A.I. is claiming that I did this on the day of Kirk’s killing, and IT WAS STILL THAT DAY AND I HAD NOT POSTED ANYTHING ABOUT CHARLIE KIRK YET. I was in fact looking up our two names to see if I had ever said anything about him or to him, before this day. And look how specific it is, by saying I had posted “a critical comment” on Bluesky. Not only do I barely post on Bluesky, but I wouldn’t have posted my Charlie Kirk hot-take there because my engagement is too low. Also, I’m a grown man. I would never use the plural of “lmao.”
I have learned that when A.I. makes things up it is called an “A.I. hallucination”. That is just a flowery euphemism for “the A.I. is wrong”. I don’t why we are using euphemisms for A.I. Are we already afraid of hurting A.I.’s feelings?
The maddening part is that when I looked up my name with Charlie Kirk’s I wasn’t trying to use A.I., but Google just plops A.I. slop at the top of your Internet search whether you want A.I. slop or not. A.I. is sneaking into our lives everywhere. Every email I write is asking me if I want A.I.’s help. I want to say, “All I want is help with spelling and grammar. Leave the rest to me.” Although I have to admit I am using it for more than that sometimes. For example, A.I. predicted that I was going to type the word “grammar” after I typed “spelling and,” so I was just like, “Fine, fill in the word ‘grammar’, BUT THAT’S THE LAST TIME IMMA LET YOU DO THAT!”
My kids’ schools have made it against school policy to use A.I., but I feel for the teachers. You used to be able to cut and paste sections of term papers into a search engine to see if it was plagiarized, but now you have A.I. plagiarizing everything, everywhere, all at once. And understand, if we get seduced into actively using it and passively accepting it then our lives will be worse off because of it.
While Alt_Man was on The Tonight Show giving out parenting tips, he casually mentioned that A.I. would soon be curing diseases. No. A.I. will not cure diseases. A.I. might help doctors and scientists cure diseases, and that’s awesome. But if you ask A.I. to cure your disease without checking with teams of scientists and doctors who will then run double blind studies, you deserve the kind of cure you will inevitably get.
Also let’s be real. ChatGPT ain’t raising Sam Alt_man’s baby, and Sam Alt_man ain’t raising his baby either. Sam Alt_man is a billionaire. Alt_man has a staff of people raising his baby. His house is probably staffed like a Starbucks at 7am. That doesn’t mean that Alt_man isn’t passing on his A.I.-gleaned parenting tips to his staff of baby-raisers. I’m sure the staff is like, “Uh huh… Yup. You say that ChatGPT said that babies need food and liquids to live. We will certainly start doing that, Mr. Alt_Man.” A.I. is going to make Sam Alt_Man’s life better, but only because of the money it makes him. If he is seriously using A.I. on his kid, well then, his kid’s life won’t be better either. When Little Alt_Man grows up, he’s not gonna need “a general purpose, sort of, life advisor.” Little Alt_Man is gonna need a therapist.
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My final word on Why A.I. is not the best
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That is absolutely chilling about the Charlie Kirk search. I had no idea that what google is showing you first is AI(I guess I should pay attention more) Thanks for the wake up call.
I certainly can tell you about hallucinations. When I’m in need of quick & dirty data confirmation, I’ve entered 10 medical journal article titles into any of the standard bots asking for the reference in the National Library of Medicine, only to find that every single response is absolutely loony. When I then tell chatGPT this fact, it “apologizes” & corrects & provides 10 more lunatic responses. Again I complain, rinse & repeat. Only this time it literally admits it has no clue what the references I’m looking for might actually be & apologies for not telling me to begin with. Last week, I asked for a comparative epidemiological statistic & it literally asked me a question, “You must pick from the 4 responses below, A, B, C, D.” NO! WTF I’m the one asking the questions here! Unbelievable. This is not a “prime time” technology” in my opinion! If I were seeking first aid when I was bleeding, you would be reading my obit right now. Sam Altman is raising a soon-to-be helpless child if his father is consulting chatGPT 5.2